Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 128, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 June 1917 — Dimensions In Language. [ARTICLE]

Dimensions In Language.

Perhaps there are states of mind perfectly expressible in language; botany reader with a love for something beyond cleverness will value a passage not so much for a content small enough to be exactly adjusted to its form as for a content which is felt to have expanded the form, to overflow it, to circle beyond it, writes George Soule in the New Republic. This is, for instance, the charm of Henry James’ style; he did not take language as it was given him and busy himself with the game of finding meanings which neatly and gracefully would fit into it; he kept stretching it and using it for new purposes until he made of this one-dimen-sional medium an imitation of three dimensions, something in which recurring variations of suggestion lead outward and back again until it conveys not a simplified procession of ideas, but a rich mind as it exists to itself.